I did too. And now...wait for it...my 20-something daughter has apologized to me. Heartfelt.
And I will admit to enthusiastically helping popularize the f-bomb back in the day. But even ten years ago, we all seemed to understand that there was a time and a place.
It's about a lack of respect. Every generation rebels, and this is the natural order of things--to question authority and etc. But there were always societal constraints. Now people swear (loudly) in the grocery store and just walking through the mall.
Remember the days of yore when a guy would swear in front of a woman and then apologize, LOL?
I wonder if we're not, most of us anyway, too eager to be "accepting" of just about everything.
Heh, this looks like a good time to tell a story about my father. He was in his late sixties when this happened, so it was probably 1990 or so.
My Dad and Mom, and his best friend "Buck" and his wife, had gone out together for dinner; afterwards they decided to go to the local mall and stroll around. They had just entered when a pair of young men, around 18-20 yo, came walking by casually cursing at each other at the top of their lungs.
My Dad and his buddy Buck, were both very old-school gentlemen... they were also WW2 vets and tough as nails. They grabbed the aforementioned young men and pinned them to the wall, and told them that here in the South men didn't use such foul language in front of ladies. They then invited the young men to apologize to the ladies in question (their wives)... the guys did this quickly and then ran off as soon as Dad and Buck let them go.
I was about 25-26 at the time, and when Mom told me what had happened I was torn between the conflicting desires to laugh my head off, and/or castigate my father vigorously for starting something that could have had serious consequences, and/or clapping him on the shoulder and saying "well done!" :mrgreen:
I settled for laughing a little and telling him, in a half-joking manner, that maybe Buck was a bad influence and he shouldn't hang out with him. Except come to think of it he was about as bad as Buck.
Sadly both Dad and Buck are gone now, and with them most of the men and most of the values of the Greatest Generation, and even in the South public decency has coarsened a great deal. Still I look back fondly on those old men I knew and wonder if we'll ever see their like again.